At 5:30 p.m. Friday, Johanna Hurley looked out the window of her home on Sunshine Canyon Drive and checked her rain gauge.

A resident of the Fourmile Fire burn area, Hurley is one of more than 50 people who serve as volunteer weather spotters for the National Weather Service.

The volunteers are tasked with visually monitoring severe weather in the Fourmile area, especially heavy rains, and report what they observe to the Boulder County Office of Emergency Management, which then passes the information on to the National Weather Service.

The Fourmile Fire, which burned more than 6,000 acres and 169 homes west of Boulder in September 2010, cleared the area of water-absorbing vegetation and affected the soil, leading to much quicker runoff from rainstorms that could lead to flash floods.

"It's been raining for since about 3:30 p.m. or so," Hurley said Friday evening. "It's steady, but it's not torrential. Not to that point where I would make that phone call."

Hurley and a handful of her neighbors in the Fourmile area played an important role Thursday afternoon in providing information on a storm that led the National Weather Service to issue a flash flood warning for the area. Three-quarters of an inch of rain fell in less than an hour near Hurley's home Thursday, and while it resulted in minimal flooding to the Logan Mill Road and Crisman areas, emergency officials said, the storm was severe enough to put area fire departments on alert.

Friday night, the National Weather Service issued another flash flood warning for the Fourmile area as rain poured down on Boulder County.

"We heard from handful of spotters (on Thursday)," said Bob Glancy, a warning coordination meteorologist with the Boulder-based wing of the National Weather Service who helped train the local spotters. "That gave us a really good description of what was going on up there."

Weather spotters

Water rushes down the side of the road in front of a house in Gold Hill on Friday.
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JEREMY PAPASSO
)

Glancy said his office, which monitors 22 counties in northern Colorado, receives help from approximately 5,000 weather spotters, and in the coming monsoon season, residents in mountain communities near burn zones, such as Hurley, will be especially helpful. With visual observations and measurements from a rain gauge, Glancy said, spotters can provide real-time data that could set in motion emergency plans and evacuations in dangerous scenarios.

"(In training) we talked about what we know about the hazard, on how fast you get an impact once you get some rainfall on a burn," Glancy said. "Where you might have been able to handle three inches of rain in a healthy forest, less that an inch of rain will cause you a problem in a burn area.

"And we think we are going to deal with that issue for a few more years in the Fourmile area."

Mike Chard, director of the Boulder County Office of Emergency Management, said that last year, the first summer after the Fourmile Fire, a July 13 storm dropped well over an inch of water in less than 45 minutes. That storm resulted in the closure of Fourmile Canyon Road and Gold Run Road, with runoff and debris damaging 10 to 20 private structures and causing a car to be washed down County Road 83, according to reports.

Flood mitigation

While area residents already were concerned about flood risk at the time, Chard said, since that storm, resident commitment to flood mitigation has been very strong.

"I think that the floods of last year helped crystallized that the risk is real," he said. "Every year we're getting stronger as a community and we'll continue in that process every year this is a threat."

Aside from the ranks of volunteer spotters, which grew from 40 or so in 2011 to more than 50 this year, Chard said Boulder County's sandbag program -- the county fills and delivers bags to communities for homeowners to use to protect their homes -- has remained popular this year. He said he has heard of more Fourmile area residents buying flood insurance this year and people have been actively planting to restore vegetation in the area.

Chard said he's hopeful the efforts will lead to a less severe flood season this year.

"From a preparedness side, there have been local preparedness efforts to where people can support one another locally for a period of time after a flood event," Chard said. "Over the next few days we have some chances for intense thunderstorms in the area, so we will be watching the skies closely and informing people of any possible threat."

Hurley said her home, near Ingram Gulch, is high in the hills and not particularly threatened by floods, but has a good vantage point for her to report on rain. She said the Office of Emergency Management is very helpful to spotters like her, and she's happy to be part of the system that feeds into the National Weather Service.

"I'm just doing the little bit that I can, which is simply to report the rate of rain and that just feeds into the larger network of information," Hurley said.

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